“It’s a question of trust. It’s a question of not letting what we’ve built up crumble to dust.” – Depeche Mode, A Question of Lust The answer to my groups dilemma struck me as soon as I began to implement the administrative functionality. We really have two fundamentally different groupings at play: people and things….

I wouldn’t think that cryptography and real-estate tend to overlap often, but they have at least three things in common: location, location, and location. Go into any office and check for notes on the undersides of keyboards, in top desk drawers, or stuck to the sides of monitors, and you’ll find every password you need…

One of the things I dislike about 1Password’s approach to Password storing and grouping is their monolithic “vault” system. I couldn’t say for sure why they designed it that way (since we’re can’t see their code), but I suspect that either the entire vault is encrypted as a discrete entity, or it’s an intentional simplification…

Some time ago, I had a conversation with my old boss, Brian Langston, about how to properly share secure items like passwords and key files within a team of developers. I’ve always kept a KeePass database, but if I have to share a login with a coworker I’m usually forced to resort to either writing…

A game called DayZ has been getting a lot of attention lately, and I hope to be able to try it out soon. FPS play can be very exciting and immersive, but I still find myself coming back to turn-based games like TBSes and roguelikes in the end. Turn-based games in multiplayer run into a…

The other day, I came across a great writeup by Thomas Brox Røst on how to set up persistent storage for a Django environment with Amazon’s EC2. It’s an excellent and informative article, but I preferred to set up my environment with a number of differences, such as Ubuntu and MySQL instead of Fedora and…

I’ve lately been paying a lot of attention to the cloud computing offerings from Google and Amazon, but the more you learn about them the more it seems like you really have to program for them. My dilemma is that I’ve developed a mostly complete application that I’d like to explore migrating into one of…

Running the ticket sales system for Playa del Fuego has presented some peculiar challenges I don’t face in most products. Primarily, there’s the issue of dealing with a thousand or more simultaneous users during opening sales but very little traffic over the rest of the year. We tried outsourcing to a third-party vendor, but their…

I just came across Cleverbot the other day, and found it pretty intriguing. When I got my first PC (an IBM AT 80286), a friend gave me a floppy with a little program on it called Eliza. I could spend hours chatting with Eliza, not so much trying to hold an actual conversation, but trying…

I was just looking at Board Game Geek, and got a vague idea for a persistent CCG that could be played as a browser MMO. You’d control a city in which you can place structure cards. These cards will generate resources every turn. Every day, you’ll draw a new hand of cards, that can be…